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OPINION

Gov. Gavin Newsom takes a big stand on the death penalty. Will it cost him?

Gov. Gavin Newsom signs the executive order placing a moratorium on the death penalty at his Capitol office on March 13, 2019, in Sacramento.(Photo: AP PHOTO)

Gov. Gavin Newsom has decided inmates on California’s death row won’t pay the ultimate price for their crimes after all — at least not while he’s in charge. Might the governor pay a price at the polls the next time around for his unilateral move that goes against voters’ own recent ballot box decisions?

“There are innocent people on death row. There are guilty people on death row,” Newsom said in Sacramento on Wednesday while discussing his executive order that places a moratorium on executions. “Those people are not going to be let out by this act; they will be held to account.

“Three out of four nations in the world know better and are doing better, they have abolished the death penalty. It’s time California joined those ranks,” Newsom said as he granted reprieves to the 737 inmates currently on death row.

This isn't necessarily permanent. A future governor could immediately reverse the order and return the system and those inmates to their prior status.

Though he has supported efforts in the past to end capital punishment, Newsom focused his 2018 campaign on other issues such as the affordable housing crisis, health care and early child development. He didn’t address capital punishment during a more than one-hour phone interview with The Desert Sun Editorial Board. (For the record, the Editorial Board endorsed Newsom this past fall after interviewing him and opponent John Cox in separate sessions. The Editorial Board also had endorsed Proposition 62, a 2016 ballot measure that would have scrapped California’s death penalty, which ultimately failed.)

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Though governors of other states traditionally have used their powers of office to grant reprieves in individual cases, Newsom joins the smaller ranks of state executives who’ve gone so far as to impose such a broad moratorium. Newsom’s order also withdraws California’s reworked lethal injection protocols and shuts down the death chamber at San Quentin prison’s death row.

In the short term, Newsom’s move changes little.

California’s death penalty has been under a court-ordered moratorium since 2006, when a judge declared as unconstitutional the injection process used at that time (Newsom’s order scraps the replacement protocol). The most recent California execution had been performed just weeks before that long-ago court order went into effect.

Though California has the largest death row in America, only 13 people have been put to death here since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to resume in 1976. California trails far behind the nation’s top four death penalty states – Texas (560), Virginia (113), Oklahoma (112) and Florida (97) – in “modern-era” executions, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC).

Golden State voters have weighed in on the death penalty more than once, most recently during 2016 when the above-mentioned Proposition 62 ban went head-to-head against Proposition 66, which was crafted to streamline and accelerate the death penalty legal process.

The pro-death penalty Proposition 66 won a somewhat narrow, 51.1-48.9 victory and later survived a challenge in the California Supreme Court. The Proposition 62 capital punishment ban, however, lost by 6.3 points.

Three and a half decades ago, three members of the California Supreme Court — including Chief Justice Rose Bird, an appointee of Gov. Jerry Brown — lost statewide reconfirmation votes after being targeted by a campaign labeling them as anti-capital punishment and “soft on crime.”

According to the (DPIC), the governors of four other states have imposed death penalty moratoriums. With his order, Newsom places California in that orbit with Oregon (first imposed by John Kitzhaber in 2011, continued under Kate Brown in 2015), Colorado (John Hickenlooper, 2013), Washington (Jay Inslee, 2014) and Pennsylvania (Tom Wolf, 2015).

Those four current governors, like Newsom, are Democrats who had decent-to-strong election wins most recently, though not in the same stratosphere as Newsom’s 24-percentage-point landslide over Cox last November. (Wolf was a 17-point winner in 2018, Inslee won by 8 in 2016, Brown by 6 this past fall).

Their re-elections came after their stands that halted their own state death penalty.

Globally, the tide continues to shift on capital punishment.

Last December, a record 120 members of the United Nations General Assembly approved a resolution calling for a worldwide moratorium on the death penalty. This was the seventh time since 2007 that the world body has formally called for an end to executions.

Critics say Newsom is nullifying California voter will by executive fiat and ignores the pleas of victim families for justice. Backers argue the death penalty has been an expensive failure that is rarely used and unfairly targets people of color.

The most recent national polling done by Gallup, in October 2018, on the death penalty found 56 percent of Americans favor the death penalty for someone convicted of murder, while 41 percent oppose it. The same survey found that only 49 percent believe the death penalty is applied fairly. That was the first time that particular figure had dipped below 50 percent in Gallup polling.

Whether Newsom pays a price in this muddled landscape in his next campaign — in California or perhaps beyond — over his death penalty moratorium is yet to be seen.